French and Francophone Literature Commons^™

Reading Antelme With Levinas: Recreational Activities In Concentration Camps, Arwa Reda

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Whether humanities humanize or not has always been a question that gathered both its proponents and opponents. Between those who confirm the statement and those who adamantly repudiate it, history has provided instances that simultaneously bear out both positions. Rather than attempting to prove or to deny the humanizing aspect of language and literature, this article looks at the matter from a different angle. Instead of the either-or argument, I propose the how as a bedrock of understanding the way humanities can humanize. Many camp survivors extolled what could be qualified as a redemptive force of language and literature. A …

La Terre Natale : À La Source De L’Écriture, Chez Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, Michèle Druon

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

"Mais le pays natal est moins une étendue qu’une matière ; c’est un granit ou une terre, un vent ou une sécheresse, une eau ou une lumière ; c’est par lui que notre rêve prend sa juste substance ; c’est à lui que nous demandons notre couleur fondamentale." --Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les Rêves.

Tout au long de son oeuvre, Colette a cherché à ressusciter dans ses textes le « paradis terrestre » de son pays natal, la Bourgogne, et le rêve profond qui lui est attaché. Déjà évoquée dans les scènes campagnardes du premier Claudine (Claudine à l’Ecole, …

Reconceptualizing Time, Space And Social Relationships: Queer Acts Of Resistance By An Aids Patient In Hervė Guibert’S To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, Salvador Lopez-Rivera

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Although Hervé Guibert’s poignant account of his life as an AIDS patient in his 1990 novel with autobiographical elements To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (original French title: À l’ami qui n’a pas sauvé ma vie ) earned him staggering critical and commercial success in his native France, the novel’s highly personal depiction of the AIDS crisis did not please French AIDS crisis activists, who criticized that it favored the author’s individual experiences with AIDS rather than documenting the sociopolitical processes that led to its development as a public health crisis disproportionately affecting sex and gender minorities …

La Colonisation, L’Identité Et L’Ambition Dans Deux Romans Francophones, Abdulameer Waly

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Cette étude se focalise sur la crise d’identité dans deux textes africains, écrit en français, Une vie de boy, de Ferdinand Oyono, et L’ex-père de la nation d’Aminata Sow Fall. Les personnages principaux de ces deux romans se trouvent dans des situations compliquées à cause des traces laissés par l’époque coloniale. Ils se trouvent déchirés entre le désir de garder leurs modes de vie traditionnelles, et la nécessité de se modifier avec la nouvelle culture qui s’impose et change irrévocablement la vie de ces personnages. Ils n’arrivent pas à concilier leurs rêves, ou leurs ambitions, avec la réalité de leurs …

Penelope’S Daughters, Barbara Dell`Abate-Çelebi

Zea E-Books Collection

A feminist perspective of the myth of Penelope in Annie Leclerc’s Toi, Pénélope, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Silvana La Spina’s Penelope.

At the origin of Western literature stands Queen Penelope—faithfully waiting for her husband to come home: keeping house, holding on to the throne, keeping the suitors at arm’s length, preserving Odysseus’ place and memory, deserted for the pursuit of war and adventures, and bringing up a son alone, but always keeping the marriage intact. Yet recently the character of Penelope, long the archetype of abandoned, faithful, submissive, passive wife, has been reinterpreted by feminist criticism and re-envisioned by …

Anticipatory Testimonies: Environmental Disaster In Claudine Jacques's Fictional Prophecies, Julia L. Frengs

French Language and Literature Papers

In Caledonian author Claudine Jacques's 2002 novel L'Âge du perroquet-banane, Parabole païenne, a tribal elder warns a man "from elsewhere": "in our country, if you remove a taboo bone, you disrupt the sea, if you touch it without respect you invite a cyclone, if you toss the bones of our elders you provoke a...tidal wave" (54). Although this work is set in a futuristic world after an ambiguous "Great Disaster" on an unnamed Oceanic island, the author manages to allegorically recount the history of the environmental atrocities attributed to the earth's human occupants that have transformed the present reality of …

Albert Camus And The Anticolonials: Why Camus Would Not Play The Zero Sum Game, James D. Le Sueur

Department of History: Faculty Publications

In 1994, I returned from Paris to Hyde Park just in time to catch a lecture about Albert Camus that an esteemed colleague, the late Tony Judt, was giving at the University of Chicago. I was much younger then, eager to engage in debate, and I had just spent most of the past two years turning over the recently opened pages of Camus’ private papers in Paris and trolling through the private papers of other prominent French intellectuals, as well as newly declassified state archives for what was to become my first book, Uncivil War.2 I had also done dozens …

Intersections In Immanence: Spinoza, Deleuze, Negri, Abigail Lowe

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The connection between French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Italian political theorist Antonio Negri has drawn attention in academic publications over the last decade. For both thinkers, the philosophical concept of immanence is central to how both respectively conceptualize the world. However, in order to consider their work with regard to a metaphysical grounding, one may benefit from turning to each thinker’s engagement with Jewish Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza whose immanent ontology, or monism, was indeed his Ethics. This essay concentrates on drawing out an ontological distinction between the philosophical projects of Deleuze and Negri by way of a close reading …

From The Cloister To The World: Mainstreaming Early Modern French Convent Writing: An État Présent, Thomas M. Carr

French Language and Literature Papers

The article is an overview on recent scholarship dealing Ancien Régime convent writing. Although nuns constitute a large percentage of the seventeenth-century women authors whose writings were published, except for a few figures like Marie de l’Incarnation Guyart or the Port-Royal nuns, their texts have been largely ignored, even by scholars engaged in the retrieval of women’s writing during the period. This is in contrast to Italian and Hispanic studies, where the contribution of convent writing is acknowledged as central. The état present discusses reasons for this neglect, the methodological challenges and perspectives for further research, along with a 120 …

A Checklist Of Published Writings In French By Early Modern Nuns, Thomas M. Carr

French Language and Literature Papers

The great amount of writing by early modern nuns that was published during the Ancien Régime is underexploited because no master list of it exists. For example, at least ninety books by some sixty different nuns were published between 1600 and 1700, and many more that have been published since. The Checklist of over 300 items is an effort to fill this gap. Besides books authored by nuns, it includes many biographies that contain samples of their writings. Short occasional texts, such as death notices, lettres circulaires, and legal factums have generally been excluded, however. Unless another location is noted, …

Théâtre Et Théâtralité Chez Flaubert, Marshall C. Olds

French Language and Literature Papers

De tous les écrits dits secondaires de Gustave Flaubert, c'est incontestablement son théâtre qui a été le dernier à susciter un examen critique sérieux. Dans l'immense bibliographie consacrée au romancier et à son oeuvre, les études sur le théâtre ont, jusqu'à très récemment, occupé peu de place : quelques pages, lues ça et là dans les analyses des romans ou dans les biographies, un nombre infime d'articles consacrés aux caractéristiques théâtrales de l'oeuvre romanesque, la publication très irrégulière d'inédits de projets de théâtre ou de notes de lecture théâtrale dont les manuscrits font surface de temps en temps dans le …

Globalisation And 'La Pièce De Cent Sous': Balzac's Nation-State, Marshall C. Olds

French Language and Literature Papers

Seen from an Olympian perspective, globalisation in today's world denotes the use of a standard model to establish relationships economic, cultural, and moral—across peoples in the absence of national boundaries capable of restraining the formation of such ties. From the national, or local, perspective, it is the invasive imposition of foreign influence in the form of a single model. From either vantage point, change and adaptation are the order of the day. Take-overs of one culture by another, whether hostile or friendly, are not historical novelties; what seems to distinguish globalisation is its planetary scope and impetus to take over …

Colonial Violence And Trauma In The Works Of Michèle Lacrosil And Ken Bugul, Marie-Chantal Kalisa

French Language and Literature Papers

To what extent can we say that both Lacrosil and Bugul rewrite Fanon? Through the study of Cajou and Ken, respectively the Guadeloupean and the Senegalese female protagonists, this article proposes a way to derive a specifically female perspective on colonial violence. The essay focuses on the two novels, Cajou and Le baobab fou, and examines the effect of colonial epistemological violence and its specific impact on the black female’s subjectivity. The protagonists Ken and Cajou revisit their initial trauma in a quest for knowledge of their historical heritage and engage in a dialogue with Frantz Fanon, representative of black …

Marivaux's Jeu De L'Amour Et "De La Raison", Thomas M. Carr Jr.

French Language and Literature Papers

At a crucial point in the third act of Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard, Silvia declares that she requires a battle in Dorante between love and reason: "je veux un combat entre I'amour et la raison," a struggle her brother Mario suggests will be to the death. In fact, the work's entire action, not just the last act, can playfully be renamed Le Jeu de l'amour et "de la raison," and while it is possible to read Dorante's eventual proposal of marriage as the defeat of reason, In a very real sense such an evaluation must be …

The Rhetorical Theories Of Malebranche: Persuasion Through Imitation Or Attention?, Thomas M. Carr Jr.

French Language and Literature Papers

France's most prominent philosopher of the second half of the seventeenth century is reputed to be no friend of rhetoric. Bernard Tocanne declares, "C'est chez Malebranche que se mettent en place tous les arguments mis en oeuvre par les adversaires de la rhétorique à la fin du siècle," and Peter France calls him "a philosopher who had no love for rhetoric." The basis of such judgments is the Oratorian's attacks in the Recherche de la vérité (1674) against the use of the imagination and passions in the eloquence of Tertullian, Seneca, and Montaigne. Malebranche's critique is symptomatic of the legacy …

Voltaire’S Concept Of Enlightened Eloquence, Thomas M. Carr Jr.

French Language and Literature Papers

Near the beginning and end of his Lettres philosophiques (1734), his first major text promoting the principles of enlightenment, Voltaire gave examples of two very different kinds of eloquence. In the third letter on the Quakers, he pictured George Fox converting his jailers with his inspired preaching. In the last letter, he praised the eloquence of Pascal before he attempted a refutation of the Pensées, calling Pascal’s projected apology for Christianity “un livre plein de paralogismes éloquents et de faussetés admirablement déduites.” Each is representative of a brand of eloquence Voltaire found objectionable. The first kind, appealing chiefly to …

Eloquence In The Defense Of Deism: Voltaire’S Histoire De Jenni, Thomas M. Carr

French Language and Literature Papers

In the Histoire de Jenni (1775), his last major conte, Voltaire returns to a pattern similar in many ways to the one he had used in his first important tale, Micromégas. In both, as Vivienne Mylne has pointed out, two discussion scenes—the first near the beginning of the tale and a second more substantial one—are set in a narrative frame involving a voyage. Critics have generally attributed this return to a structure relying heavily on debate to convey his message to Voltaire’s increasing use of the philosophical dialogue in his later years. Perhaps a more fruitful approach, however, …

L'Aspect Metaphysique Du Mal Dans L'Oeuvre Litteraire De Charles Baudelaire Et D' Edgar Allan Poe, Arnolds Grava

University Studies (University of Nebraska) (1888–1984)

L'oeuvre litteraire de Poe et celle de Baudelaire ont ete l'objet de nombreuses recherches faites par des hommes de lettres et des critiques distingues tant en Europe qu'en Amerique depuis la seconde moitie du siecle dernier jusqu'a. nos jours. II est assez curieux de constater qU'aucune de ces oeuvres critiques n'a traite, du moins directement, Ie cote philosophique, c'est·a.-dire, les implications meta physiques de la production litteraire des deux poetes. Par-ci, par-Ia on peut trouver quelques chapitres, generalement trop courts, consacres a. l'etude plus ou moins approfondie, soit du satanisme baudelairien, soit de l'esprit de la perversite chez Poe. C'est …

Racine, Prosser Hall Frye

University Studies (University of Nebraska) (1888–1984)

When Racine began his career as a dramatist, he found thegen:.. eral definition of French tragedy already formulated by Cotneille. However the latter had come by his conception-whether freely and of his own instance, or in yielding to the pressure of offiCial criticism, or what is even more likely, in attempting to effect a compromise between these two influences-the upshot of his labour was, to all intents and purposes, the doctrine of the three unities. All that remained for Racine was to adapt himself to these prescriptions. N or should the'difficulty of the task be underrated. It was one which …

Corneille: The Neo-Classic Tragedy And The Greek, Prosser Hall Frye

University Studies (University of Nebraska) (1888–1984)

It is not solely the fault of our critlcs that we have no such criticism as the French; it is also the fault of our literature. To write a history of English literature like M. Lanson's history -of French literature is, even on that small scale, impossible from the nature of the subject. . To be sure, there is no such general interest in the former as in the latter. The historian or the critic who undertakes French letters finds an opinion already formed, a canon already established. His meal is at least partly ground for him; ' he has …